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Marine Wrestling (Review)

To hear Krush tell it, he just happened on these two dudes during Fleet Week in May of '95--two US Marines out of California, looking for beer and pussy in New York City. Krush waved $100 under their noses, promising the green to whichever stud could win the most wrestling falls in thirty minutes, and the two took him up on the offer.

The result is a classic, even by Krushco's usual high standards of take-no-prisoners grappling. It's hard to believe that Krush has managed to sit on this tour de force for fifteen years before finally putting it up and out there for us greedy pigs to pounce on. It's called "Marine Wrestling," and Krush threw us this raw steak about two weeks ago.

Everything works in this video, from the lamp clamped to a chair, heightening the cheap tension by casting long shadows and bleaching out details as the fighters careen too close, to the patched-together mats, hardly thick or sturdy enough to buffer the percussive slams and blows the enthusiastic roughnecks inflict on one another.

The bigger tattooed guy, in shiny commie-red trunks, is hot in a crazy-ass Sean William Scott sort of way, which is to say ... hot as hell. At first, the smaller guy, in the stars and stripes, looks like he's just the white mouse being dangled for the pet python to crush and snack on. Red knocks him around some--in a loutish but good-natured way--a bit like a bored sadistic big brother.

Then something happens. USA taps into his inner heel, and all of a sudden we're thrown some serious kicking, punching, gouging, grunting, and choking. Damn, I thought I had died and gone to heaven!

Nothing fake or phony about this contest. The rounds are speedy and clipped at first, mostly horseplay, but horseplay involving guys well trained by our government in hand-to-hand combat. But as the fighters begin to tire out, bodies slick with sweat, and tempers flaring, the smell of that C-note in the nostrils, the clenches become a little more brutal and the squeezes last a few sweet beats past the loser's tap-out. Not to suggest that either fighter ever really lowers himself to unsportsmanlike conduct--just the opposite, as, between rounds, they show each other the utmost respect and consideration.

I hope the winner got laid off that $100 he won. I hope he had the good manners to slide an ice-cold mug over to the loser too.

Damn, I wish I could have been there! If not to have launched myself into Red's hard, up-for-anything-so-long-as-it-hurts muscle, then at least to have felt the reverb as these two fighters' bodies crashed and slammed together on the mat.

This video, though, is the next best thing to having been there. And if Krush has got some other archival footage of this sort stowed away, I hope he plans on whipping it all out for us ... and soon.